Two polls released last week showed Republican Rand Paul leading Democrat Jack Conway in Kentucky’s U.S. Senate race, raising Paul’s lead as calculated by Pollster.com’s polling average to 6.5 percentage points.

The Courier-Journal/WHAS11 Bluegrass Poll showed Paul up by 15 points, while a cn|2 Poll showed him leading by nearly 5 points.

The cn|2 Poll, a live-interviewer telephone survey of 802 likely voters conducted by Braun Research, showed Paul leading Conway 42.1 percent to 37.4 percent, with 20.4 percent undecided or favoring another candidate. The poll, conducted Aug. 30-Sept. 1, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.46 percentage points.

The latest polling gives Paul a 47.1 percent to 40.6 percent lead over Conway in Pollster.com’s average of all independent polling in the race. We excluded a poll sponsored by the Conway campaign from that average. When it’s included, the average shows Paul at 44.9 percent and Conway at 39.6 percent.

Paul’s 6.5 percentage point lead in the Pollster.com average is up from 6.1 points on August 23.

Comments (5)

But the pollster average doesn’t include either of the last two polls in both of which Rand Paul went up, including this SUSA poll showing Paul ahead with 15 points. From the trend line in the pollster graph, the last poll they show is the Cn2 one that didn’t even use voter registration lists to id those polled. That was the ONLY poll to show the candidates in a virtual tie.

The combined average still shows Rand Paul up by a significant margin. Considering the things that Jack Conway has done since the primaries have ended, and combine that with the mood of the electorate, you would find that Rand Paul’s chances of winning a US Senate seat are increasing almost daily. Even some Democrats have privately conceded that Jack Conway is done. If I were a gambler, I wouldn’t bet against Rand Paul in the general election.

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